Alex;
I agree, so whisper your thoughts into the ear of a passing
> journalist, or publish a paper on a subject :)
>
>
That's more or less what I was going for here, yes.
> > Why do we do this at all?
>
> I think it's the usual desire to not only create things, but be close
> to the things we are creating.
I agree. And I want the audience close to the things I create as well. I
also feel that other methods of performing computer music don't allow for
this in the same way. I believe that tools like Live and it's ilk often keep
us further away from our material
I don't feel, however, that Livecoding will inherently be exciting or that
other ways of performing will be boring and closed as there are very good
performers who are able to communicate musical gestures made on a laptop
very well. To me this method offers options and
perspectives unavailable elsewhere. We may critique that lack of excitement
in many performances and that might have been the cause for it all but I
feel that it's the method that sets us apart and not the excitement or
"charisma" itself.
>
> I think Turkle would say Dijkstra's is the dominant 'planner'
> masculine approach, against the more creative 'bricolage' feminine
> approach. Perhaps in that case live coders are all feminists. I'd
> love people's opinions on this, especially if you disagree.
>
>
Personally I feel that terms like "masculine" and "feminine" are very
dangerous as they mean a few things at the same time. They will mean
different things to you or to a biologist or to a dock-worker who is
surprised his colleague doesn't like soccer and cars. They may refer to
phenotype, genotype, behaviour and quite likely more things that can vary
relatively independently from each other. As we recently saw in the news
about a Australian transsexual the terms have judicial meanings as well and
as we saw last year at -I believe- a Olympic running competition it may not
be at all clear *how* to determine what we call "masculine" and "feminine"
in all cases. Therefore I'm not so much in favour of equal rights for women
as I'm in favour of equal rights for everyone, disregarding gender. As
pointed out before elsewhere; using a single bit of information to
categorise people will lead to serious issues with rounding errors. I'm not
sure whether that makes me a feminist, I think it doesn't, yet I still
suspect we agree. I should add I'm perfectly fine with people
self-identifying with such terms. Some of my best friends claim to be "male"
or "female" on their social networking pages ;-).
Planning v.s. intuition does sound like a important distinction here, I
agree. I would say it warrants inclusion to explain how we are different
from both "business" coders in addition to how we deviate from "traditional"
musical performance.
Yours,
Kas.
Received on Fri Mar 26 2010 - 13:08:56 GMT